Someone broke the Twitter

By
Aaron Morrissey

They say that technology has truly arrived when people use it mindlessly in their daily routines. Well, every morning, when I wake up, I get my coffee, check my email, read several local news sites. Then I filter through Twitter, beginning with where I left off the night before, checking for the variety of insights, stories and assorted internet miscellany which the local media hasn't already covered. It's a tidy little routine, if a troubling sign of my inevitable descent into obsessive-compulsiveness.

But this morning, my morning jaunt through Tweetie -- the slim third-party client which I use to manage my multiple Twitter accounts -- was rudely interrupted by a spat of tweets that contained malicious links. Thankfully, I've been around the block a few times and knew to avoid them, but the problem went even deeper -- anyone using Twitter's website to read and post tweets was blindsided by a nasty bug which caused those who even rolled over an offending link to open pop-ups and third-party websites, or retweet bad tweets.

Obviously, this is a problem. Especially so in D.C., where discourse between journalists, politicians, government agencies, emergency services, businesses and citizens over Twitter is constantly being exchanged.